The Cardinal's Invitation
To practice hospitality, we must pay attention.
I was walking home from work the other day when I called my mom. Here in Chicago, we’re at the start of what’s supposedly called “Spring,” but I’m calling it Yo-Yo Season: one day it’s sunny and we’re approaching 80º, the next day there’s a few inches of snow on the ground, and it’s rinse-and-repeat the following week.
This particular day was somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, and it seemed to confuse the neighborhood birds. Walking down the tree-lined street, my mom suddenly interjected: “Wow! Do you hear that?”
I replied, “Oh yeah sorry, the neighborhood construction is really picking up!”
Mom: “No, listen, it’s a cardinal! He’s calling for a mate!”
And sure enough, I looked back and my eyes caught a splotch of bright red high up above me. During Yo-Yo Season, the trees have not yet bloomed, so it was easy to spot him through the barren branches. And his melody—*whoooop-cheer-cheer-cheer-cheer-cheer!—*cut clean through the drone of the excavators and cement trucks up ahead.
I’ve always loved cardinals. In the city, they’re rare enough that it always feels like a real event when I see one, yet they’re common enough that frequent walks guarantee I’ll spot a few. This particular fellow was the first cardinal of the season. I’m glad he so confidently made his presence known, and even gladder that my mom was attentive enough to notice him and call him out to me.
“You know, if Grandpa Bud were here,” she mused, “he would whistle back to the cardinal.” She then gave her best impression of Grandpa Bud’s best impression of the cardinal’s song. I’m confident the cardinal could not hear this song through my headphones, but I was pleased to serve as an intermediary, mentally assuring the cardinal that at least my mother and I enjoyed his performance.
And it’s absolutely true: if Grandpa Bud were somehow able to walk my neighborhood streets with me today, he would whistle back to every last bird perched above us. For her part, Grandma M filled her garden with bird feeders that attract the cardinals and the robins and the hummingbirds, to say nothing of the butterfly bushes that would bring monarchs in tow. My grandparents were prolific travelers too, carrying binoculars and point-and-shoot cameras with them everywhere they went. If I could thank anybody for instilling in me the importance of paying attention to this neon world, it would have to be my grandparents.
My inheritance is the manner in which these two walked through this world with such attention to all that was alive around them. Grandpa Bud found absolute peace sitting in his canoe for hours with a fishing pole. Grandma M saw God in a dragonfly’s wings. Their eyes, ears, and minds were always open to what was around them. The watchful witness of their lives stand in such stark contrast to the age of distraction we live in today.
Yet, Grandma M and Grandpa Bud’s capacity for attention was not limited to the flora and fauna. They had an uncanny ability to make friends with anybody in any place at any time. They maintained lifelong friendships with folks from the Louisiana Bayou and small river towns in Indiana. They consistently managed to find themselves sitting at tables with absolute strangers, even when traveling across oceans to foreign lands. My grandparents paid attention not only to what was around them, but also to who was around them. And in doing so, I believe they learned how to be gracious guests and eager hosts.
I’ve written about this before, but I learned what it means to welcome friends and strangers into my home through my family. The principle constituted a through-line from my grandparents’ home down to my mother and her brother (both of whom are incredible hosts in their own right) and now into my home and those of my two brothers.
Hospitality is not just a value I hold at my core. Increasingly, I’m also coming to understand hospitality as my inheritance.
Freely given, hospitality begets hospitality. What I mean by this is that the act of welcoming a stranger to our table—feeding them, dignifying them, attending to their need, uplifting their humanity, compassionately and curiously honoring their story—can have a sort of domino effect. The boundary between guest and host is not ironclad; it’s permeable. One can pass between positions: finding oneself fed by a neighbor in the first moment then breaking bread from that same loaf to offer to a neighbor in the next. Diligent and persistent acts of hospitality are contagious and multiplicative. As my friend Karyn Resch Brackney so eloquently notes, when Jesus approached the 5000, he “didn’t wave his hands and create a mountain of bread and fish to feed the crowd; the abundance only happened as people passed the bread and fish to one another, hand to hand.” If you found yourself in the midst of the crowd, it would be impossible to say where the guest-host relationship began or ended. But it would be undeniable that hospitality was happening.
Karyn says it best: “[T]he miracle wasn’t that Jesus fed the 5000; the miracle was that the 5000 fed each other.“
It was not unusual to find a stranger sitting at our family table during a holiday meal. We carried the common conviction that nobody should have to be alone on Easter, Christmas, or any time there was an excuse to share good food and better stories.
This charge, to welcome the stranger and open my table to the one who needs a meal, is my inheritance. I also believe that for each of us, in one way or another, this moment in time calls us to communities of hospitality. The urgency of our moment asks this of us.
Rachel and I started something new (to us) this past weekend. We’re calling it Sunday Suppers. The idea is pretty simple: we pick a theme, make a bunch of food, and invite family and friends and friends-of-friends over to share that food with us. Maybe people make new connections and friendships form. Maybe some folks who’ve found themselves isolated and lonely for a season have a chance to forget their worries for a few hours. Maybe somebody simply shows up hungry and leaves with a full belly. Whatever the case, Rachel and I decided that our role is not to seek a particular outcome, but simply to set the table and open the door.
By that measure, the first Sunday Supper was a beautiful success. Our small garden-level unit was packed like sardines with people meeting, laughing, and sharing slices of homemade pizza. I’m grateful to have a partner like Rachel to work with me to pull off an event like this, but I’m even more grateful and humbled by our guests who chose to share their evening with us.
The world feels uncertain and fearful right now. The speed at which terrible things are happening to vulnerable people as authoritarianism takes hold in the United States has me feeling weary and exhausted. The Sunday Scaries hit harder and faster these days, and nothing about our Sunday Supper provided an immediate remedy or solution to the collective troubles that are plaguing us.
And yet, I went to bed that night with the sense that something significant had happened in our home. Far from being a practice in simple diversion or escapism, this big and boisterous shared meal represented, to me at least, the substance of this one life we get to live: our freedom to love each other, laugh with each other, feed each other, and walk with each other into the uncertainty of each day.
My hope with Sunday Suppers is that we might constitute what Karyn so eloquently calls a “community of abundance.” Contrasted against the economics of scarcity that dominate our age of unbridled wealth inequality—an economics founded on the idea that there is not enough to go around and that survival is secured by playing a zero-sum game—a shared meal is a simple reminder that we can play another game defined by mutual flourishing and interdependence.
Karyn writes, “Committing to a community of abundance is a radical act of resistance that requires the courageous belief that there is enough to go around if we can learn to trust one another, to be vulnerable with our needs, to share without fear.” And I believe that the way we begin acting on this commitment is shockingly simple: we show up where we each are, gather together physically, share space and stories. It doesn’t have to be overcomplicated. You can cook or you can call for a potluck. It can be a homemade pizza party or it can be a pot of good old-fashioned blue-box Mac and Cheese. It can be forty people or four. Don’t let such considerations limit you! It’s not the particulars that make these spaces sacred: it’s the commitment to gather, to extend the invitation to our neighbors and to accept the invitations we’re presented with.
The only caveat is that we cultivate communities in ways that are radically inclusive, designing and cultivating shared spaces of safety and belonging for everybody. Our queer neighbors, our disabled and immunocompromised neighbors, our immigrant neighbors, our adolescent and elderly neighbors—in other words, everybody who’s already around us whether we realize it or not!
Here, too, Grandma M and Grandpa Bud are my tutors, pointing me to what the world is so eager to reveal. That community of abundances surround us every day.
I can place myself on that treelined street watching that cardinal sing his love song into the blue sky as Grandpa Bud sings back to him. And I see that the tree he is perched on will provide a home this year for the cardinals and the robins and the finches. I know that broken branches from this tree will end up in birds’ nests miles away and in the mouths of happy-go-lucky labradors walking along the sidewalk. I know that on a hot summer’s day, after those branches are dressed in green, I’ll take refuge in this tree’s shadow on my walk home. I know those green leaves will soon fade to a rusty orange and blanket the ground. I know they’ll begin to break down and mulch the ground and feed the soil we walk on and all the invertebrates and worms and fungi and bacteria who call that soil home. I know there are nooks and crevices in this tree where the squirrels will store their nuts and seeds in anticipation of the next winter. I know that one of those squirrels may drop one of this tree’s seeds on her way to another depository. And one day that seed might sprout from the ground, and one day down the road a ruby-red cardinal might confidently sing his love song from the branch in some distant Yo-Yo Season.
And so it goes. And so the cardinal’s song invites me to acknowledge communities of abundance are already here. At Grandma and Grandpa’s table, high up in the trees, far down in the ground, and in our homes if we’ll allow it.
We need only to listen, to pay attention, to set the table, to open the door.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
-Teilhard de Chardin
If you have a few extra minutes today, I implore you to read Karyn’s whole essay on communities of abundance. It’s brilliant.